When I first encountered Unity it was because there were performance problems on a Japanese only version of Bejeweled built with it and they needed someone to fix it. It was a classic: creating huge numbers of new objects for particle effects hammering the gc, and the fill rate of the then cutting edge device GPUs not being a match for their screen resolutions.
Unity took several years, and a huge amount of investment, along with improvements in the wider ecosystem, before performance became much less of a concern for normal developers. A lot of the work they did around C# usage to achieve this is really surprisingly intense.
In the near future I seriously think 2D (and some subset of simple 3D) game devs would be better off looking at Defold, and if you want to make immersive 3D just bite the bullet and move to Unreal. These days cost of preparing assets drastically exceeds coding time anyway.
I started evaluating Defold this past weekend and I have been very impressed.
The developer experience is very similar to Godot, especially if you work on your scripts with external editors. Everything that has to do with building and running the app is faster than Godot though.
Initial builds with Defold are very fast, it has on demand hotreload, and very small binary sizes. The small binary size makes it well suited for working on web games.
The Godot Editor is still a tad bit nicer to use, but I do like the fact that the Defold editor is written in Clojure. I imagine it makes extending it fairly quick.
The main reason I see myself sticking with Defold over Godot is because scripting is done in Lua.
The Lua ecosystem has a lot history in the game dev space making it easy to search for answers. Lua is trivial to extend and has multiple statically typed options that compile to it. Notable statically typed languages are Typescript and Haxe. Also Lua has a lot practical use in many domains outside of the Defold editor unlike GDScripts lock-in to Godot.
Defold has no where near the size of the community of Godot, but the developers seem very active on the forum and GitHub.
I need to play around with it more before I’m 100% sold. Both Godot and Defold are great looking choices for 2D.
>and if you want to make immersive 3D just bite the bullet and move to Unreal
Since Godot is right there, I'd rather try and bring up a current up and coming engine to somewhat parity rather than give up to Epic.
Also, iteration is godawful in Unreal. Not everyone is trying to make Gears 6, so I wouldn't mind a more lean 3D engine to work with if I have low-poly or simply not-dense scenes to manage.
>These days cost of preparing assets drastically exceeds coding time anyway.
Only if performance isn't a concern. There's a reason engineers are still paid more than the equivalent artist at studios. That performance is still hard to work with or around, even in Unreal Engine
What advantage do you think defold has over godot for 2d (apart from currently seemingly being more polished)? Theres lots of people complaining in this thread that GDscript is not serious enough as an engine language, but Godot at least has a decent c++ api. Defold only seems to support Lua (although you can extend the engine with other languages afaik).
Bluntly, getting too hung up on languages is procrastination. Lua is more than fine. (GDScript isn't actually that bad, just completely esoteric). Similarly I wouldn't get hung up on Blueprints or C++ when worrying about Unreal, partly because their C++ is so particular it's extreme.
Defold is basically a pile of interesting simple subsystems, especially around game logic, that in combination become surprisingly powerful, and the experience of the devs shows. It is one of those tools that even if you never use it again some of the ideas stay with you.
I actually agree with you about the language-stuff. I thought your parent-command was essentially making some kind of performance-based comparison between defold and godot, which is why I mentioned Lua.
Defold seems interesting, but unlike Heaps and Godot it hasn't yet been used for any game I've heard of.
(additionaly I don't really agree that Gdscript is particullary esoteric. It's basically python, with a bunch of very obvious engine-api stuff added on top. Language-wise theres very little to learn there, which is great)
> Defold seems interesting, but unlike Heaps and Godot it hasn't yet been used for any game I've heard of
Is this true really? It appears to have been bought by King (Candy Crush Saga) and used internally (see the Defold about page). So while it may be associated with mobile/casual gaming it was worthy of being purchased and used by an otherwise successful company -- at least along some metrics.
Acquiring anything usually has a period of investigation and inquiry which Defold passed.
Seems at least worthy of consideration next to Heaps and Godot.
Unity took several years, and a huge amount of investment, along with improvements in the wider ecosystem, before performance became much less of a concern for normal developers. A lot of the work they did around C# usage to achieve this is really surprisingly intense.
In the near future I seriously think 2D (and some subset of simple 3D) game devs would be better off looking at Defold, and if you want to make immersive 3D just bite the bullet and move to Unreal. These days cost of preparing assets drastically exceeds coding time anyway.